Manas T

Ever seen the strike rates of batsmen like Adam Gilchrist ? Always greater than 100%. Saw something like that in my Google Adsense account today. See the screenshot.

3 impressions, 4 clicks and a CTR of 133%.

Beat that CTR and of course the CPM.

Ever since I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu Feisty, VLC has been making a cracking sound while playing video files especially at high volumes. But Totem plays the movies alright.

A bit of searching led me to this bug filed on Launchpad. So I concluded that the problem is with VLC media player.

Workaround to the VLC cracking sound in Feisty

There are two options either wait till there is an updated build of VLC or try this workaround to get rid of the cracking sound in VLC.

1. Go to Applications —> Sound & Video —> VLC Media Player.
2. Then click on Settings —> Preferences.
3. Expand the Audio preferences. Click on Output Modules and check the Advanced Options checkbox.
4. Select the Audio Output module as Linux OSS audio output.
5. Save and restart VLC. You will not hear the cracking sound anymore.

Now open the videos in VLC. You will never hear the cracking sound again.

Hope this helped you.

Seems like bloated applications are the order of the day for Windows. And if you want to know what bloated means you just need to try Nero 7 and iTunes.

So here I present a list of lightweight, memory efficient applications for Windows XP. These applications do what they are supposed to do without eating up on your system’s resources. And there is one for almost every need. Another good news, all of these applications are free.

1. PDF Reader – Foxit PDF Reader

Still using Adobe PDF Reader to read PDF files ? Then you got to try Foxit PDF reader. This super light PDF reader launches your PDF documents in a matter of 2 seconds to the maximum.

Download Size : 1.67 MB

Memory Footprint : 8MB

Download Foxit PDF Reader

2. Audio Player – foobar2000

A must try application for users who like to have their media player designed to their needs. Do not get fooled by its lean looks. For a simple example of what you can do with foobar2000, have a look here.

Download Size : 1.60 MB

Memory Footprint : 2MB (Default install)

Download Foobar2000

3. Instant Messenger – Miranda

Why keep YIM, WLM, GTalk and many more keep running in the background when you can use just one application to connect to all these networks and even more. Use Miranda IM. As the Miranda home page says Smaller, Faster, Easier.

Download Size : 1.09 MB

Memory Footprint : 1.6 MB (Default install)

Download Miranda IM

4. BitTorrent Client – uTorrent

One of the best torrent clients available for Windows. Loaded with all features you will ever need, yet takes less than 1MB of RAM while running.

Download Size : 646 KB

Memory Footprint : < 1 MB

Download µTorrent

That’s all for now, I will keep on adding / updating this list as I find new ones. And if you want some of your apps to be on this list, do not forget to leave a comment.

5. Video Player – VLC Media Player

Not exactly light on resources, but definitely better than the Windows Media Player bundled with Windows. VLC has a load of features and also plays almost all the video files thrown at it without the need for additional codecs to be installed.

Download Size : 9 MB

Memory Footprint : 32 MB

Download VLC Media Player

Don’t know which font to use on your blog or site ? Using good and easily readable fonts is the first step to building a accessible website/blog and it could well be the deciding factor as to how much time visitors spend on your blog.

Enter Typetester. An online tool which lets you compare fonts right on your screen before you use them in your blog/website.

Typetester is an online application, that can be pretty useful when you need to check or choose a typeface for your (next) project.

Some points about Typetester :

• You can select three different fonts and compare them at the same time to see how they will look.
• You can set the size, leading, tracking, alignment, color, background and decoration of the font.
• Fonts from user’s system are pulled into a web page, so you will never miss out on your favorite fonts.

After finalizing which font you want to use, Typetester goes a step further to give you the CSS code to implement the font on your blog/website.

Try Typetester now and tell me if it helped you..

This is going to be nothing short of a new revolution. OpenDNS has introduced a new feature enabling you to create your own shortcuts for websites you frequently access.

With OpenDNS shortcuts turned on, the address bar of your browser can be used to launch websites via your own shortcuts (for example g for google.com or mail for mail.yahoo.com).

What Shortcuts ?

For creating a shortcut you first need to log in to your OpenDNS account. Then go to Shortcuts in My Account. There you can create the shortcuts you want.

For example if you frequently access Wikipedia. Using OpenDNS shortcuts, you can simply create a shortcut wiki in OpenDNS, so that everytime you type wiki in the address bar of your browser you will be taken to Wikipedia.

You can create as many shortcuts as you like. For these shortcuts to function, you should obviously have set up OpenDNS on your computer. If you have not, it is very simple. Just change the DNS servers of your connection to the ones provided by OpenDNS which are :

208.67.222.222

208.67.220.220

You can change the DNS server from the TCP/IP Properties section of your network connection.

Try it ! || How To Set Up Open DNS || How to use OpenDNS shortcuts